PIM for component manufacturers - Take control of product data

PIM for component manufacturers:

Efficient maintenance and distribution of product data
with Perfion PIM

In component production, it is necessary to have complete control of your product data if you want to be able to service customers as quickly and with as many details as they expect. With the Perfion PIM system, you can easily solve challenges such as many product variants, multiple language layers and the need to deliver product information according to industry standards.

Five major advantages for component manufacturers in using Perfion PIM

You eliminate manual processes so you can maintain a large number of products easily and efficiently.
You can present detailed data to the customer.
You will significantly reduce resource consumption from producing product sheets and displaying products on websites and other channels.
Effectively manage updating of product information across component parts.
You can easily manage product data in multiple languages for export markets.

If you produce electrical, mechanical or other types of components for the industry,
you will normally have a large product portfolio
with thousands of product variants.

Many companies in this industry start out managing their product data in Excel when the volume of data is manageable, but as the company grows, they find that it becomes far too resource-intensive to maintain and distribute product data manually.

The need to be able to distribute customer-specific product information quickly, error-free and in specific formats such as ETIM makes it necessary to have a product information management (PIM) system as a “Single Source of Truth” for product data.

When product information is spread across different spreadsheets, databases and in the back of the minds of key employees, it becomes impossible to work efficiently and avoid errors when making your product data available in catalogues, online stores, etc. You and your colleagues can spend hours finding and validating data, making it impossible to deliver it at the speed that customers expect.

With a PIM system as a Single Source of Truth, the manual processes are automated and it is easy to ensure valid, updated product information.

Many customers request data sheets with specific and detailed product information, including, for example, images and certificates.

It can be an insurmountable task to solve manually, but with Perfion PIM, the process can be automated using templates and integration with InDesign. It is even possible to let customers serve themselves and generate customized datasheets online for the products they are interested in.

How to publish catalogs, datasheets and price lists in a flash with a PIM system

This guide covers some of the typical challenges in working with catalogs, price lists and datasheets, and how a Product Information Management system can speed up work and improve results.

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Component manufacturers usually sell to an international market, which is why it is crucial to be able to deliver product information in a number of languages.

Language versions become a mess and source of errors, because they require resources to keep up-to-date if you have to do it manually. But the PIM system as a Single Source of Truth makes it easy to ensure that all updates are implemented correctly in all language layers, so that you avoid confusion and frustrated customers due to incorrect product information.

With a large number of products, you need a strict structure in your ERP system that does not need to be weighed down by unnecessary information. At the same time, you need to be able to make flexible categorizations and relationships between products and product components.

With a PIM system integrated with your ERP, you can keep your product data synchronized and ensure that only relevant information is stored in the ERP, while at the same time you can handle features and related information with great flexibility in the PIM system.

When working with components, you have to handle different variations of the same product, where a lot of data is repeated from product to product. Manually processing product information means that the same information must be added again and again, but with Perfion PIM, the process can be streamlined significantly with data inheritance.

In Perfion, you select which data you want to inherit from other components; thus, you only need to make a change in one place to edit all components that have the same data. It is also possible to inherit data from different levels, so that overall data is inherited for all products in the category, for example, while specific data is only inherited for the relevant product types.

Often, different departments will be responsible for delivering their parts of the overall product information. This can make it difficult to maintain an overview and results in lengthy approval processes for product sheets, for example.

This approval process becomes a simple matter in the Perfion PIM system, where you can automate the process using workflows. In this way, you can easily get an overview and see what input you need.

Perfion’s “where used” function also gives you quick insight into where specific products, images and other product information are currently displayed.
With the ability to configure dashboards in Perfion, you can easily create a visual overview of product data use.

How to optimize the entire value chain with PIM

In this guide we focus on how to utilize the PIM system as a motor for a number of business value chain optimizations, and on the concrete gains you can attain in product development, procurement, manufacturing, marketing, sales and after-market services.

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At CITIZEN, Perfion manages the product information of 3000 watches and 50-60,000 spare parts spanning 10 different languages, including e.g. descriptions, Material Safety Data Sheets, sketches, customs codes, images, etc.

Time spent on updating one data sheet across 21 languages went from 2-3 hours to 5 minutes

With Perfion’s built-in report designer, Watson-Marlow's 9000 data sheets can be created / updated and published on the website automatically in all languages with consistent product data from Perfion.

Handling a change in a data sheet now takes 5 minutes instead of the previous 2-3 hours.